Fewer veterans received prescriptions for risky dosages of opioid painkillers after a USA-wide initiative took aim at reducing high doses and potentially dangerous drug combinations, a new study has found.

Over a two-year period, high-dose opioid prescribing declined by 16%, and very-high-dose opioid prescribing dropped by 24%. The number of patients receiving both opioids and sedatives also dropped by 21%.

The study, published in Pain, looks at the effect of the Opioid Safety Initiative (OSI) rolled out by the Veterans Health Administration in late 2013 to promote safer opioid prescribing. The study examines implementation of the OSI across all of the country’s 141 Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals.

Under the OSI, the VHA created a “dashboard” tool using its national computerized medical record system to allow local VA clinical leaders to systematically review opioid prescribing and give physicians feedback.

The researchers hope their findings could help other large health systems use their own electronic medical systems as part of a larger initiative to address a key aspect of the nation’s epidemic of painkiller overdoses and opioid addiction. The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Michigan Medical School and Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation (Ann Arbor, USA), the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System , and Yale University (New Haven, USA).

The researchers studied VA opioid prescribing for the year before the OSI rolled out, and the OSI’s first year. The national VA system had made other attempts to combat risky opioid use before OSI, including guidelines for prescribing, but the new research shows OSI greatly accelerated the downward trend.

The team calls the findings encouraging. But they caution that further efforts to drive down risky opioid prescribing will need to continue to take patients’ pain, mental health and addiction care needs and physicians’ decision-making into account.

“As our nation as a whole is learning, it is important to reduce risky opioid-related prescribing,” says Lewei Allison Lin, the first author of the new study and an addiction fellow in the University of Michigan Department of Psychiatry who trained in the VA system.

“We hope that these findings, showing the VA OSI was associated with a reduction in risky prescribing, will encourage others to consider similar healthcare system interventions to address this complex issue.”

Senior author Mark Ilgen adds, “These results highlight the importance of addressing provider behaviors in our efforts to address the opioid epidemic, and the need for large health systems to develop and implement systematic approaches that are flexible enough to allow clinicians to make individual decisions while still reducing the overall prevalence of potentially risky prescribing.” Ilgen is an associate professor of psychiatry at University of Michigan and research investigator at the VA’s Center for Clinical Management Research.

Deaths and cases of substance use disorders linked to opioid painkillers have risen to epidemic levels in the USA, with more than 14,000 deaths from prescription opioids in 2014 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Accidental overdoses among people taking opioids that interact with other drugs have also been on the rise, so the OSI effort also focused on use of benzodiazepine sedatives. The study found that OSI resulted in 781 fewer patients each month receiving both an opioid and a benzodiazepine.

However, the new data shows variation among VA hospitals in OSI’s impact. In a minority of hospitals, high-dose opioid prescribing actually went up during the study period.